Dictionopolis

This was an exercise in which we had to read a text and draw pictures from it. We had to use a mixture of using our own imagination and using research to do it. I chose a few parts of the text which I wanted to draw out. The way that I drew my pictures was quite literal in which I drew exactly what I read but before I did that I also wanted to look at other ways I could approach the sentences.

“Trade wars”…”individual words are also on sale” initially I thought that trade wars was education and lectures as in those circumstances people trade knowledge off of each other. I thought that the “individual words on sale” initially meant the sale of books. However I thought that I would take a bit of inspiration from a trip I went on to Turkey during half term and I decided to use the spice market as a sale for individual words.

“The spelling bee is an enormous insect which spells out its words letter by letter when it seems useful or necessary.” This could have been thought to resemble a peacock displaying its feathers. “it seems useful or necessary” could suggest it as being a mating call to other spelling bees like peacocks do. I searched around pinterest to come up with a couple of ideas on how I could interpret this. https://www.pinterest.co.uk/agnestrashmail/dictionopolis/

“P full of pips” with this sentence I took it quite literally. I used a mixture of secondary research of a mouth that I found online and my own imagination. I wanted this drawing to be minimalist with single lines and flat tones as I thought if this drawing was next to text it would be nice to view the usual plain type with a plain image.

“…finally ceased when she put up a sign saying “silence is golden”. This image was also a mixture of a physical photo of my hand holding up a piece of paper and imagination as I was struggling to draw a whole hand from imagination.

“The Royal Palace physically resembles an enormous book standing on its end, with a door in the place usually occupied by the publisher’s name.” At first I wanted to draw the palace with the pages facing toward the ground as I thought it would make a nicer shape resembling a palace rather than a book standing upright (which is what I assume it meant by “on its end”) but then I realised that the door wouldn’t be in the right place as the text suggested so I went with the normal stand of a book.

“A french connoisseur has described some letters according to colour rather than taste: A black, E white, I red, U green and O blue.” I imagined this in two ways, one was a more authoritative approach and one as more of a laid back, artsy way. Again I used a mixture of imagination and a picture from google to come up with the end result. I wanted to include the connoisseur’s nationality in some way so I thought to paint the wall as the french flag.